Do climate sceptics really deserve to be executed because of Typhoon Haiyan?

While I was away being Radley's Provocateur-in-Residence (yes, it went very well, thank you) someone calling himself Sai Gon Seamus (an expatriate Irishman living in Vietnam, I'm guessing) Tweeted this at me:

If it hadn't been for the hashtag, this would have puzzled me greatly. But I think I can roughly guess what he's struggling to articulate. He's saying: "As an evil climate change denier you are as bad as a Nazi propagandist. Just as William Joyce was hanged for his complicity with a regime responsible for so many deaths, so you deserve to die because of your partial responsibility for delaying the urgent action that might have prevented the occurrence of Typhoon Haiyan in which thousands needlessly died…." Something like that, anyway.

Well it goes almost without saying that the man is a prat. And a rather menacing, unpleasant-sounding, mentally unstable prat as that. But, unfortunately, it's not just the out-and-out nutcases who have been pushing the Typhoon Haiyan = Another Deadly Sign Of Man-Made Climate Change line. Here, for example, is the BBC's Roger Harrabin having a go.

And here's the head of Filipino delegation at the Warsaw climate conference who set the ball rolling with his emotive, tearful plea for action, ending in the claim "We can stop this madness. Right now, right here."

Well the response of the Filipino delegate you can understand and forgive: a) his family comes from the worst hit area of the Philippines; b) he's a greenie delegate at a greenie climate conference so he's bound to view any extreme weather event in a doctrinaire way c) it's his job, damn it. One of the things we've seen consistently throughout all the recent COP conferences is delegates from the developing world using "climate change" as a stick with which to beat and – more pertinently – try to extract more aid-money from the rich Western nations.

And it's not just evil right-wingers like me who've noticed c). So too, even, have deep green card-carrying lefties like the Obama administration, which is revealed in the Guardian today to be very worried about the possibility that the US will end up having to fork out for all the damage ostensibly done to the Third World by allegedly man-made climate change. Gosh why does the phrase "hoist by your own petard" spring so satisfyingly to mind?

So anyway, yes, you can forgive the Filipino delegate for spouting all that tearful, emotive drivel. But the other people I've quoted? No. I don't think so.

What's interesting when you read their claims is that none of them is capable of producing any credible scientific evidence that "climate change" has anything whatsoever to do with Typhoon Haiyan. That'll be because – as Benny Peiser notes in the Spectator – the science says no such thing. Even the not-exactly unalarmist IPCC is in agreement on this one. Here's what it says in its new report:

Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin… In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low. (H/T GWPF)

What we saw in all these articles, in other words, was the comical spectacle of alarmists tying themselves in knots as they attempted desperately to explain how even though "the science" clearly shows no link whatsoever between the Philippines typhoon and "climate change" it nevertheless is sort of because well it just is…

Look, I'm sorry guys but this really won't do. If you're going to write alarmist articles reverently invoking your favourite sciencey science experts to show how totally the science supports your claims about the dread threat of man-made global warming, you can't suddenly junk your key evidence sources when they contradict what it is you'd like them to say. Well, you can: everyone has the right to make an unutterable prat of himself in print. But it doesn't do much for your credibility, let's put it that way.

But that isn't, of course, a point that would ever be understood by the no doubt mostly well-meaning pillocks who've spent this week trying to use Typhoon Haiyan as an excuse to justify more concerted global action to "combat climate change." I suspect they genuinely imagine, in their sad delusional way, that theirs is not only the morally right position but also a cost-neutral one. Prats, I say again. Prats!